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Comment by modoc | Hacker News Reader

I think you're unfortunately wrong on this point. While high earning well educated people may live longer, at least in the US they aren't reproducing more. Most of the educated/high-earning people I know are either not having kids at all, or are having 1-2 kids. Most of the lower educated, lower earning people I know have 3+ kids and have them at a younger age, which in turn leads to larger descendant populations in a shorter time period. Medical care is good enough (at least here in the US) that virtually all of those children are making it to adulthood, and then reproducing.

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That's a fair point... that we live in a world with birth control, and where people are more likely to make a conscious decision to not have kids does change the dynamic.

But I still don't think that any of that would lead one to think that "evolution has stopped". Even if you step back to only focus on what you describe as "the lower educated, lower income" people, there's still competition for reproductive success within that group. If nothing else, sexual selection is still a factor, even if survival selection isn't as much a factor.

Another thing to consider is the "red queen" theory that human evolution and the evolution of pathogens are locked into a (more or less) permanent "arms race". I don't know that anybody knows for sure that that theory is true, but if it has merit, that's another reason to believe that we are still evolving on some level.

Evolution hasn't stopped, but it's failed to move in any direction we can call forward. We've long since hit the age of Devo [1], where the selection pressure of genetics and the things we consider progress as society are at odds. I'd be hard pressed to find anyone among even my conservative friends (and I'm fairly far freaking right as far as HN is concerned) who would consider the Quiverfull[2] movement/cults to be the preferred future of humanity, but they're growing fast. Likewise, inner-city welfare-queens are a real thing, albeit fringe.

The alternative is to actively promote reproduction of the successful... which sounds, quite rightly, like eugenics. It's a nasty paradox.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d43gKl9xIME [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quiverfull

Those are societal/cultural things, which is a separate issue from genetic evolution. Those groups may still be selecting healthy (physically, mentally, economically) mates from the pool, even if they're not a culture that you think is desirable.

Evolution hasn't stopped, but it's failed to move in any direction we can call forward.

That may be, but evolution doesn't answer to our conscious desires and ideas of social good or progress. It really is just "the blind watchmaker". What we evolve into isn't "good" or "bad", it just "is". Or at least that's the way I look at it.

Another thing to consider beyond which subgroup is reproducing more is to what extent the subgroups are inter-mating. Who is to say we don't diverge into different species completely in the distant future?

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